The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled, 8 to 7, on Thursday that Michigan’s voter-approved 2006 ban on affirmative action was unconstitutional.

The ruling, in Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action v. University of Michigan, was not based on racial discrimination, but rather on a violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. The ban, the court said, unfairly placed a special burden on supporters of race-conscious admissions policies.

People trying to change any other aspect of university admissions policies, the court said, had several avenues open: they could lobby the admissions committee, petition university leaders, try to influence the college’s governing board or take the issue to a statewide initiative. Those supporting affirmative action, on the other hand, had no alternative but to undertake the “long, expensive and arduous process” of amending the state Constitution.

“The existence of such a comparative structural burden undermines the equal protection clause’s guarantee that all citizens ought to have equal access to the tools of political change,” said Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., writing for the majority.

This is an extraordinarily unpersuasive argument by the Sixth Circuit majority. Before this ruling, proponents of affirmative action facedexactly the same burdens as the opponents of affirmative action faced in 2006 when they got their initiative approved. Heck, proponents don’t need 58% of the vote like the ban got, they just need 50% +1 vote to amend the state Constitution.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Wrong, of course. Structural racial discrimination on behalf of groups who vote Democratic is self-evidently justified, as everyone would see if their eyes weren’t clouded by sin. Or something.

Despite the good intentions with which it may have been launched, at this point affirmative action has nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with power, as this Christopher Caldwell quote cited by Sailer recognizes:

“One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.”

Conservatives have to hope that the Supreme Court outlaws all race-based college admissions schemes when it rules this term on the Fisher case.

“One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.”

Ah, no.

Charles Murray pointed out recently, “45 of 50 governors and 96 of 100 U.S. senators were still non-Latino whites in 2010. Whites also were 92 percent of the directors nominated for Academy Awards between 2000 and 2011. They were 96 percent of Fortune 500 chief executives in 2011. The numbers are similar for other influential positions in U.S. society.”

In 2009, white households had on average $113.2K in net worth, Hispanic households had $6.3K, and black households had $5.6K. Meanwhile, in 2010, 27.4 percent of blacks and 26.6 percent of Hispanics were poor, compared to 9.9 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 12.1 percent of Asians.

Let’s maintain perspective. This seems at a glance like it was a silly decision, but let’s not lapse into fantasies here.

Statistics about the very tippy top of US society have very little to say us about society overall, and nothing what-so-ever to say to a Frank Ricci or Barbara Grutter who have been discriminated in their attempts to merely advance themselves a bit.

Statistics about poverty and net worth reflect the skills, education, cognitive ability, and work ethic and spending habits of the populations involved (on average of course). For ‘Hispanics’ it also reflects their huge immigrant and first generation American population.

Of course, if you’re going to cite statistics like that, one might also wonder why you choose to ignore the success of certain minority groups (Asians), magnify the plight of other minority groups (African-Americans and Hispanics), and completely ignore the fact that there may be very real culturally-specific issues that go a long way in explaining such a discrepancy (the lack of a family unit for most African-Americans and the distinct presence of one for most Asians).

One time I wrote an opinion piece for my high school paper (back in 2002) about how affirmative action wasn’t a good idea anymore because it was creating or encouraging racial resentment and whatnot. Not my best work, but I believed the basic points.

Later that week we had a senior assembly run by students, and during a lull where everyone was chatting I saw a group of black students looking at the school paper, and one seemed to be upset. I randomly thought to myself, “God, I hope he doesn’t go up to the front and call me out as a racist for that article.”

Then, to my slowly mounting horror, he started making his way to the front stage with the newspaper. Damn, I thought, I’m going to have to defend myself without acting all nervous like I always do, or they’ll think I’m racist and probably beat me up after school.

He got to the front, took the microphone and, as I held my breath, called out the name of a different student. One who’s article was printed on the page opposite of mine. An article entitled “Acadamy Awards Huge Disappointment” with a big picture of Halle Berry accepting her award. An article complaining that too many black people won awards that night, and it seemed a little suspicious, like the acadamy was pandering.

This other student wasn’t in the senior class, so there was no racially charged confrontation at the assembly. But thank you Brian, wherever you are. If not for you, I might have been in an extremely uncomfortable situation.

So in closing, I’m not a fan of affirmative action, but I’m not going to talk about it in public. I don’t want to test my luck again.

Perhaps a new challenge should be mounted, on the grounds that “affirmative action” (i.e., the designation of blacks as a “victim group” to be given preference in this/that/the other thing) violates the Constitutional prohibition against the awarding of Titles of Nobility.

Because that, in fact, is what “affirmative action” does; it awards members of those protected groups a higher legal status than the typical citizen. And if that’s not an award of a title of nobility, I don’t know what is.

This is not what it seems. The ruling was not about affirmative action itself, but on the legal process for challenging a possible wrong through the courts. By making some challenges more difficult than others, by incorporating them into their state constitutions rather than by just passing a law, or even an ordinary referendum, the court finds the legal system has itself been made to slant one way, and that’s not okay.

The solution would be to pass a law that could be challenged like any other law, in the courts. Or a law by referendum. Or, to pass a federal amendment to the Constitution. It’s just saying that state constitutional amendments like this violate the due process clause of the 14th amendment (not the equal protection clause). It’s very much a procedural matter, not one passing judgment on affirmative action itself. And of course we’ll see how the appeals courts deal with it. Could become a good Supreme Court case.

This is the kind of activist judiciary that really hasn’t been seen since Roe v Wade. The flaw is that there is no way to counteract an out of control court other than a higher court. Even amendments aren’t working anymore.

Those net worth stats don’t only “reflect the skills, education, cognitive ability, and work ethic and spending habits of the populations involved.” They also reflect a history in which almost all blacks and many Hispanics were excluded from the suburban housing market by federal policies and local real estate practices until at least the early 1970s (largely because of FHA and HOLC’s rules that blocked neighborhood integration in defense of stable housing values which prevented blacks from qualifying for a federally insured mortgage).

That history doesn’t tell us anything about what to do about those differentials in net worth or about whether affirmative action does much to counter them, but the federal underwriting of an exclusionary housing market (and those houses’ appreciation over time and the passage of housing wealth from generation to generation) to does explain at least a portion of the differentials.

I have supported the principle of affirmative action since the beginning of my first career, which was in employee benefits (focus on pensions, required to know much of the rest).

Institutionalized discrimination was a fact of life in the late 70s. Minority applicants for jobs had their paperwork tossed without review, leaving one to wonder about the “not or less qualified” complaint’s validity. Minority workers were routinely passed over for promotion, and the EEOC had and has a track record of denying claims from minorities who could not demonstrate their qualifications for the promotion.

Some things have changed in the last almost-40 years. One thing has always stayed the same: Opponents of AA, having no overt recourse to continue their discimination legally, found ways to sabotage it. The BS about quotas has no support in the original language concerning proportions. Department of Labor (emphases added FE):

i.The numerical goals are established based on the availability of qualified applicants in the job market or qualified candidates in the employer’s work force. Executive Order numerical goals do not create set-asides for specific groups, nor are they designed to achieve proportional representation or equal results. Rather, the goal-setting process in affirmative action planning is used to target and measure the effectiveness of affirmative action efforts to eradicate and prevent discrimination. The Executive Order and its supporting regulations do not authorize OFCCP to penalize contractors for not meeting goals. The regulations at 41 CFR 60-2.12(e), 60-2.30 and 60-2.15, specifically prohibit quota and preferential hiring and promotions under the guise of affirmative action numerical goals. In other words, discrimination in the selection decision is prohibited.

Let there be no mistake about the nature of my support for AA. To illustrate: Fire departments should neither volunteer or be forced to relax qualifications for women or minorities. Their qualifications can be questioned in the general case, but in the end it is the professionals and experts who must make the ethical decision: are they in fact prohibiting qualified candidates or not.

The same holds true in every profession.

I have yet, in all the blogs and threads about AA, to see an opponent of AA acknowledge the actual provisions of it.

The notion that the proponents of AA didn’t “have equal access to the tools of political change” is so absurd that the court would have made more sense if it simply said, “We’re going to do what we want to do anyway, so nanny nanny boo-boo to you.”

I’m strongly in favour of affirmative action for Black people, Latinos and Native Americans (and strongly against it for women). I see it as a matter of justice and morality, and I don’t care if the majority of white people see it otherwise. Basic questions of fairness and morality can’t be left up to the whims of the mob. As we know, the mob chose Barabbas.

I think affirmative action is, in part, a deeply conservative measure. It dovetails quite nicely with the conservative insight that people exist as members of groups, not as autonomous individuals, and that fairness to the group is just as important as fairness to the individual. In this the conservative and the socialist agree, against the liberal. Unfortunately, it seems like in this matter as in so many others, too many so called conservatives care less about genuine conservative principles, and more about white tribalism and racial identity politics.

As a resident and registered voter of Michigan, I’m very glad the Supreme Court did the right thing here, and refused to give in to the racial resentments of the mob. Maintaining racial harmony and equality for Blacks and Latinos is more important than giving in to popular prejudices.

I think cultural liberals are wrong about many of the sex & gender issues, but affirmative action is one of the social issues on which I fully agree with them, and wish they went much further.

“By making some challenges more difficult than others, by incorporating them into their state constitutions rather than by just passing a law, or even an ordinary referendum, the court finds the legal system has itself been made to slant one way, and that’s not okay.”

So what if state legislators and voters decide to legalize SSM in their state by passing a constitutional amendment? Are you saying that it would be a violation of the 14th amendment because it would be harder for opponents of SSM to challenge?

The comments on this thread so far yet again reinforce my decision to avoid stating opinions about constitutionality. As much as I think I know about it, I always come up short. 😉

Consider how all of this might have been avoided if the law simply required that all application processes be blind until the final interview. A neutral party would mask anything on an application that indicated gender, age, race, ethnicity, such that only the person’s directly relevant qualifications were evident to the hiring manager(s). Further, publicly publishing the merit ratings of all applicants would become the very simple benchmark against which to measure the “mix” of those finally hired. Were there only 1% of the qualified applicants from minority A? Then the company cannot be faulted for hiring 10 people with only one A person. And no one in A can make a claim based on the fact that the local community or region is 10% A. That is a simple illustration of the original regulations.

The opposition has a simple agenda: Hiring managers consider it their right to hire whom they please according to any arbitrary criteria that pleases them or helps them keep their jobs, as with nepotism. Sure, one can argue that there were or are very few racists in hiring positions, but when they routinely hire Manager Junior solely because he is the honcho’s son, not even examining whether there are better-qualified candidates, or simply decide that it is their duty to hire “their own people” out of familial or ethnic loyalty, the practical effects are identical.

From the current generation’s point of view, when a young adult looks at his or her parents and grandparents with college degrees and good GPAs working as janitors or food servers, notes the color of their skin, and has friends not of their skin color whose parents and grandparents have positions of relative importance because of whom they knew, I find their lack of motivation to spend four or more years on college not only reasonable, but of perfect sense.

In the meantime, they’ve fulfilled the myth of “not or less” qualified their parents and grandparents could not overcome.

Wrong, of course. Structural racial discrimination on behalf of groups who vote Democratic is self-evidently justified, as everyone would see if their eyes weren’t clouded by sin. Or something.

Oh, I don’t know about that, Rod. Where I live our “local” school attendance lines were redrawn every single year for decades to keep schools segregated. And when a school when from white to minority it did so in a single year, as the line shifted dramatically to ensure that white kids didn’t have to go do school with black or latin “gang” kids.

The notion that structural racial discrimination is only a liberal thing is belied by the entire history of America. But let’s be honest, true “affirmative action” isn’t achieved by quotas and the like, but by connections made between people. Those connections cannot be made if there are policies that “passively” keep people separated…

That’s not a defense of this, or any, decision, but the notion that America is today color blind and that there are not strong forces segregating the land is as wrong-headed as the notion that the problem can be solved by playing a quota game.

The notion that structural racial discrimination is only a liberal thing is belied by the entire history of America.

I don’t really disagree with you that there has been, and in some places may still be, structural racial discrimination. My objection here is that the idea that the way to fight structural racial discrimination is by imposing structural racial discrimination is unjust and unreasonable. Moreover, this particular decision is judicial activism run amok. Think of it: the federal court said the people of the state do not have the right to outlaw a type of race-based discrimination.

If one supports this decision, one is saying that my child, who is white, should be under a state mandate to be unfairly disadvantaged in college admission, simply because of the color of his skin. Not because of the content of his character, or the quality of his work, or the nature of his work ethic. Only the color of his skin.

One other thing: I think it would be a travesty to tell a college that it *must not* consider anything related to ethnicity when determining which of those who did not meet the guaranteed admission criteria will be admitted.

I think you are unaware of how rare your life really is, that your kids have already had a broader experience of the world than the vast majority of kids entering college. Telling colleges that they *must not* use a desire to expose their students to a broader set of experiences than their students had in their home towns seems just as wrong as saying they “must” reserve a percentage of their positions for one ethnic group or another.

Come, let us reason together, the Lord told Isaiah, and though your sins be as scarlet, I will make them white as snow. (Note, the polarity was SCARLET and white. Also, “white” people are far from matching the color of snow).

Surely we can do better than the tortuous reasoning a bare 8-7 majority of 6th circuit judges have offered. Also ,we can do much better than petulant whining that any consideration of race is “a state mandate” that “my child, who is white” will be “unfairly disadvantaged in college admission.”

We are far beyond the point where someone of a disadvantaged ethnicity or race should be admitted to a college they otherwise wouldn’t qualify for, as a means of rectifying or atoning for generations of exclusion of perfectly well qualified candidates of that race or ethnicity.

But, college admissions involves all kinds of discretionary decisions. Before “affirmative action” took center stage, parents whose kids did not make the cut were whining about all kinds of other reasons it was “unfair” that “my child” was not admitted to their first choice school. As a matter of fact, I was not admitted to my first choice college in 1972. I’ll never know why, and I would have considered it poor form to ask.

Among the legitimate discretionary considerations that do not involve pure grade point average or test scores, are: seeking a good fit for the philosophy of the institution (Hillsdale anyone? … Catholic universities preferring Catholics, or at least students who respect faith in God?), avoiding too great an imbalance between men and women (now that women are not a tiny minority any more), and yes, a preference for a reasonable cultural diversity among the student body that reflects the world students will have to deal with upon graduation. It is a good thing not to have a lily-white campus. It will also be good to find a way to “integrate” the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, while preserving their history. I have a few ideas, but they would take money I don’t have to offer.

One of the not-illegitimate conservative complaints about the way the law acts to end racial discrimination is that it suppresses legitimate exercise of discretion, by demanding a rigid, measureable comparison of the qualifications of two individuals. Let’s not be too quick to set rigid counter-regulations.

Hopefully the Supreme Court will not apply a meat ax when a scalpel is called for.

I get why affirmative action in the workplace bothers people: jobs are in short supply (even in good times). But colleges? Come on, if you can’t get in one you will be able to find another than will take you. This is a little like complaining about the existence of handicapped parking places when there are plenty of other spaces available.

Franklin Evans position has been presented before, and it’s interesting why people don’t really listen, or they wouldn’t present arguments that aren’t up to the facts he presents. Now Rod’s position isn’t really anti-affirmative action, but when you construct a structural racial discrimination. Will people please respond to that
My response isn’t that Rod is wrong. He isn’t. But my point is about when to pick your fights. To me Obama is representative of getting ahead. Romney was( and he is past tense) representative of staying ahead. We voted for the lower classes, and even the middle classes, to get ahead. It is a fact that we have had some years where the upper class has had a chance to expand. Their share of this economy has grown exponentially over the past few years. Now this court ruling isn’t right, but it’s not a trend. Affirmative action is grossly misunderstood if you will just listen to Franklin Evans. Lower and middle class children need education, or we’re not going to get them a leg up. Let’s all concentrate on boosting the ideas that low and middle class youth need be able to succeed, rather than fighting over 1 stupid court decision.

“If one supports this decision, one is saying that my child, who is white, should be under a state mandate to be unfairly disadvantaged in college admission, simply because of the color of his skin.”

Actually, that’s not what it says at all. Instead, it says you and your fellow voters can’t pass laws through referenda that unfairly burdens one group more than another. This isnt about affirmative action,it’s about how far can voters go in creating barriers for fellow citizens to bring about change or challenge state rules.

One of the things missing from conversations about AA is the role uncertainty plays in the selection process (hiring, college admissions, etc…). We don’t have perfect metrics for who the “best” employee, student, etc.. will be.

For example, while there is a pretty good correlation between average SAT score and average college GPA, there is also a substantial scatter at each point. Objective metrics that accurate predict the performance of individuals that let us draw bright lines with a high degree of confidence don’t exist. That’s why interviews and the “look test” are so important (its like picking football players on the basis of their combine performance versus watching how they play in college. The former may be objective, but that doesn’t make it more reliable). Sure a kid with a 1600 SAT is almost always going to do better in college than a kid with a 900 – but it isn’t white kids with 1600s that are getting the shaft because of AA (asian kids might have more room to gripe here actually). But no one can predict with reasonable confidence that a student with a 3.2 GPA and a 1220 on the SAT is going to do better than the kid with a 3.6 GPA and a 1080. But somehow we have to decide who to admit and who not to admit. We look at extracurriculars, essays, and sometimes interviews – all subjective and they are helpful. But here’s the thing. If you are black or have an apparently black name, people will judge you more harshly than if you are white. The same thing has been shown for women. Identical CVs were circulated to department chairs who were asked to rate the qualification of various faculty candidates. Women came out behind men across the board – even though the only difference was the first name! When teachers grade assignments or decide on grades – black kids are judged more harshly than white kids. Experiment after experiment has demonstrated bias across society. The data on this as it pertains to sex and race is really quite solid.

If there were an objective metric that predicted future performance perfectly, then we wouldn’t rely so much on subjective metrics. But that isn’t the world we live in. Given that and the fact that we know that there is significant bias directed towards women, blacks, and hispanics society has an interest in offsetting that bias (bias is directed against Asian Americans too, but often that bias runs towards overestimating intelligence and workethic and underestimating social skills). The resentment and permanent underclass that results is not healthy for society. The goal of AA is to ameliorate the effects of sex and race bias. Sure there are problems with implementation, and it can be a pretty coarse tool, but then our our meritocratic selection criteria are perfect either.

The idea that the white kids are getting the shaft because of AA would imply that we have a standard that demonstrates that they are clearly more qualified than the black kids that got in ahead of them. It isn’t at all clear to me that that case has been made. Slight differences in average LSAT/GRE/SAT scores notwithstanding.

I do think there are important questions to ask about mismatch – underqualified kids who get boosted to schools where they cannot reasonable compete. The biggest spreads don’t come from AA per se – rather compare the SAT scores of football and basketball players to the general student body (or their majors, high school rank, college gpa, or graduation rate). The spread is astounding and abysmal. Similarly for legacy students, students whose parents are connected, and students fundraisers are interested in. It isn’t at all clear that these kids are better off going to colleges where they are significantly behind their peers.

I’m unconvinced that giving the nod to black kids when their credentials are similar to that of white kids (within the predictive uncertainty) is unjust. I’m not sure it is the most helpful thing we could be doing, but I do see it offsetting bias and thus helping at the margins.

If one supports this decision, one is saying that my child, who is white, should be under a state mandate to be unfairly disadvantaged in college admission, simply because of the color of his skin. Not because of the content of his character, or the quality of his work, or the nature of his work ethic. Only the color of his skin.

If your child is turned down as a direct result, s/he’s mediocre or on the low/undesired end of the class anyway and would probably be better off going to some place with lower standards.

My understanding was that AA was an attempt, at least in part, to reverse the unearned advantage of the legacy admission (which you had no access to if your grandparents/parents were legally barred from entering a state university regardless of their qualifications).

As a generation has now cycled through that with the obvious imbalance at least addressed, it makes sense that it is time to consider sunsetting it.

“Instead, it says you and your fellow voters can’t pass laws through referenda that unfairly burdens one group more than another.”

Please, this is just a too clever by half justification to preserve affirmative action.

The it doesn’t unfairly burden one group. If a group of white Americans went to the U of Michigan and said, “our ancestors built this university, we pay the majority of taxes to support it, we think we should have a preference of 50 SAT points over blacks”, they would be stopped (in the admittedly unlikely event the U of Michigan listened to them), by this referendum. Further, anyone who wants a return to the discrimination against whites that is Affirmative Action can get their own referendum on the ballot.

It’s the same old same old. The deck is stacked against whites. And it is obvious that any sort of sophistry will be employed to maintain that discrimination.

“If your child is turned down as a direct result, s/he’s mediocre or on the low/undesired end of the class anyway and would probably be better off going to some place with lower standards.”

Ah the voice of the ‘I’ve got mine’ white (most probably) loather of other whites.

It is one thing to be smug, however, and another to be innumerate. It is pretty usual to see the pro-black discrimination to be about one standard deviation. So a white kid might be two standard deviations above the average, or in the top 2.5% percentile, and still get turned down in favor of a black kid that is in the 84% or a hispanic in the 90% percentile. Obviously the white kid is not only not ‘mediocre’, he would be far more likely to succeed in a truly competitive environment than would the AA recipients.

No matter what its authors think, that study didn’t test ‘racial bias’, it tested bias against people with ‘ghetto’ names. Unfortunate, but probably rational. Here is an image search for ‘Caitlin” and here is one for ‘Laquisha’. Notice the relative proportion of mug shots. You can try it with all sort of typical ‘white’ and ‘black’ names (avoid celebrity names), you’ll get the same result.

Now, when real sociological studies are conducted, we get findings like activities like 4-H weigh against applicants to elite universities, and that poor white kids are 1/7 as likely to be admitted( controlling for grades, test scores, etc) as even Asian kids, and it goes down hill from there.

Who knows; maybe after dealing with Justice Thomas for a few years, Justice Allan Kagan and that broad who looks like Hugo Chavez’s evil twin sister will decide the right way about “affirmative action.”

After all, “affirmative action” as a policy is clearly racist and not in the way most conservatives try to present it. It is a policy based on a white-supremacist mentality: the notion that people with darker skin (who lack “limpieza de sangre” perhaps) could never, ever succeed on their own merits.

It is absurd to the nth degree. The King of Spain’s niece, born as a “hispanic” in the United States, needs a few extra percentage points on her law school admission application? Michael Jordan’s kid is at more of a disadvantage in American society than “Honey Boo Boo” will be when she tries to climb into the Ivory tower?

Only an elite cadre of true, educated fools would try to defend, intellectually or morally, such a bereft ideology.

@M_Young Do you have a source for that? What school is rejecting kids in the top 2.5% in lieu of kids in the 90th? That big a spread would be really surprising (I assume you mean SAT or some other similar test?).

While there might be some basis for giving an AA boost to DIRECT descendants of American slaves and Native Americans, why is it routinely given to minorities fresh off the boat and Latinos who got here after the amnesty. In what way were they harmed by the policies of our government and what are they “owed” by the rest of us? If they are failing, it is because of their deficiencies.

JonF: I get why affirmative action in the workplace bothers people: jobs are in short supply (even in good times). But colleges? Come on, if you can’t get in one you will be able to find another than will take you.

Then why the need for affirmative action for colleges? If minorities can’t get in one they will be able to find another that will take them.

Well Franklin Evans why people don’t acknowledge the actual provisions of the law is because that is meaningless. Flowery language about goals that don’t mean anything in the real world. Everybody who has paid attention knows it means quotas and lowering of standards for minorities.

Hector, why should Latinos get Affirmative Action? For that matter, why should anyone who comes to the U.S. of their own free will? I can see an argument for Native Americans or for blacks who are descended from slaves, but why do we owe preferences to someone who came here of their own free will?

FE
“I have yet, in all the blogs and threads about AA, to see an opponent of AA acknowledge the actual provisions of it.” Perhaps you’re not making much of an effort. Affirmative Action is not simply some outreach program. Discrimination is essential to any successful affirmative action program. And how does one show a sincere commitment to affirmative action, one that satisfy government bean counters, without resorting to numbers?

Hector:
You’re certainly free to “think” that AA is somehow conservative but I’m not even remotely convinced that it is. And why include Latinos, most of whom are recent arrivals and most of whom voluntarily chose to live in America? Why should people who voluntarily come here because they know where they’re better off, be included with blacks and American Indians, two groups that have a unique and unfortunate history in this country? Why should Latinos get preferential treatment over native-born whites? Convince me. By just about any measure, Latinos who come to this country are much better off than in their native countries
“white tribalism and racial identity politics.”
The term Latino implies tribalism and Latino support for affirmative action policies are a reflection of racial identity politics.

Chris
“Those connections cannot be made if there are policies that “passively” keep people separated…”
Most white liberals I know “actively” purchase homes in all-white neighborhoods and “actively” ensure that their children will learn in classrooms full of other whites and some Asians.

“the notion that America is today color blind” I’ve never heard any opponent of Affirmative Action claim this but I have heard liberals accuse such people of believing it. We’ll never, ever have a color-blind society.

Mike: “Actually, that’s not what it says at all. Instead, it says you and your fellow voters can’t pass laws through referenda that unfairly burdens one group more than another.”

Voters in several States recently voted to legalize SSM. Do you believe those laws are invalid because they place an undue burden on those who oppose SSM?

You’re right, the court didn’t rule on the constitutionality of AA. Instead, essentially it declared that proponents of AA are now a protected class. So any law prohibiting AA is unconstitutional because it creates a hardship on the new protected class,
not minorities.

Now you support AA, but think beyond that issue and look at the precedent the court is setting here. I’m sure you would hate to see laws you believe are necessary declared unconstitutional because a court has declared the proponents of repeal a protected class and, because of that, the court rules that the old law (the one you like) is unconstitutional because it discriminates against the new protected class.

No matter where you stand on AA, these sloppy slope decisions should concern all of us.

One thing I think only a few people have touched on, that paints affirmative action, at least in regards to college admissions, in a quite damning light is what it’s done to the people it’s supposedly trying to help. One can name a multitude of reasons against it – it basis benefits based on race and it keeps the people who do get it expecting handouts based on something other than merit.

But those who take an alternative stance could always stake their arguments on the idea that afirmative action would help the segment of the population that’s been most harmed by institutionalized racism. This hasn’t been the case, actually. I forget where I read it (maybe the New York Times) but studies show that letting in people who are unqualified isn’t going to someone make these people into successful students at the college level. In fact, in California where I believe universities can no longer use race as a factor in admissions, the same number of African Americans graduate than did when affirmative action was instituted. It’s just that now unqualified students aren’t all droping out, and the ones who did have the requisite qualifications are still graduating, just like before.

The point is that it’s not helping a person to place them in an academic atmosphere where they’re in over their head. It’s a nice, liberal idea that people can progress wherever their dreams may take them, but some people actually are more intelligent than others, some are geared more to achieve than others, and those factors actually will play the primary role in who succeed academically at prestigous universities. It’s better to give kids a chance at universities that might be a little less challenging and where they can thrive, than it is to place them at universities that they either aren’t prepared for or don’t have the natural faculties to succeed. This fact, I think demolishes the affirmative action argument: it’s hurting the kids it’s purporting to help.

The Hamptons, in Malibu or Maui?
The boardrooms of the Fortune 500, at Goldman Sachs, or in the Silicon Valley?
Are there too few white doctors, lawyers or accountants, shareholders, landowners or CEOs?
Are there too few white professors, deans or provosts?
Are there too few whites on the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the Cabinet?

To be sure, the deck is stacked, stacked for those who are currently in positions of wealth and power against those who are not currently in positions of wealth and power.

Very strange ruling. Just for what it’s worth, of course, the voters of California decided to stop affirmative action by state agencies including the universities back in the 1990s. It remains controversial in the usual circles of course, but it’s also the law of the land.

I don’t know if the Supreme Court should outlaw affirmative action. There might be a place for it. The notion that a state cannot halt it, however, is indeed bizarre.